Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

There are two basic patterns of vibrations in the Dark Night, and they are actually the Dark Night’s defining characteristics. One may get overwhelmed by the descriptions of emotional difficulties, but keep these patterns in mind and try to stay on that level. One is fairly slow, somewhat regular and chunky, at perhaps 5-7 Hz, with not much else going on. It’s an early Dark Night thing and it tends to feel like a shamanic drum beat. The later pattern is fairly fast, perhaps 10-18+ Hz, a bit more irregular, and has faster and slower harmonics in the background and around the periphery of our attention. It tends to make us feel very buzzy and edgy. The fact that the background is beginning to shake is a good sign of progress, as this needs to happen for the cycle to be completed. On the other hand, it is exactly the fact that the background has begun to shake and crumble that can cause people to freak out.

Things were all fun and games when the primary object was shaking, but when the sense of the observer starts to shake, that can be creepy.

Simply pay careful attention to exactly what is happening, staying with each pulse of each vibration as clearly as you can, trying to see each from its beginning to its end. Chances are you will be just fine.

There are two basic things that happen during the Dark Night, one emotional, the other perceptual. Our dark stuff tends to come bubbling up to the surface with a volume and intensity that we may never have known before. Remembering what is good in our life can be difficult in the face of this, and our reactivity in the face of our dark stuff can cause us staggering amounts of needless suffering. On top of this, we also begin to directly experience the fundamental suffering of duality, a suffering that has always been with us but which we have never known with this level of intensity or ever clearly understood. We face a profound and fundamental crisis of identity as our insight into the Three Characteristics begins to demolish part of the basic illusion of there being a separate or permanent us. This suffering is a kind of 184

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suffering that has nothing to do with what happens in our life and everything to do with a basic misunderstanding of all of it.

Dealing with either of these two issues, i.e. our dark stuff and our fundamental crisis of identity, would be a difficult undertaking, but trying to deal with them both at the same time is at least twice as difficult and can sometimes be overwhelming. It goes without saying that we tend not to be at our best when we are overwhelmed in this way.

The knee-jerk response often is to try to make our minds and our world change so as to try to stop the suffering we experience. However, when we are deeply into the Dark Night, we could be living in paradise and not be able to appreciate this at all, and so this solution is guaranteed to fail. Thus, my strong advice is to work on finishing up this cycle of insight and then work on your stuff from a place of insight and balance, rather than trying to do it in the reactive and disorienting stages of the Dark Night! I cannot make this point strongly enough.

As a close friend of mine with a ton of experience in insight practices and a gift for precise language and teaching so aptly put it,

“The Dark Night can really fuck up your life.” However, I will give you two hard-won pieces of advice that I have found have made the difference in the face of these stages. First, make the time to do basic insight practices. Do your very best to get sufficient insight into the Three Characteristics so as to get past this stage! Make time for retreats or alone time and don’t get stuck in the Dark Night. You and everyone around you will be happy that you did so.

The second piece of advice is to have a “no-bleedthrough” policy when you suspect you are in the Dark Night. Simply refuse to let your negativity bleed out onto everyone and everything around you. Failure to do so can be disastrous, as your profound lack of perspective, fixation on negativity and the suffering from your fundamental crisis of identity can easily get projected out onto things and people that simply did not cause that suffering! No one appreciates this at all and it does no good whatsoever.

Combining these two pieces of important advice, resolve thus, “I have recently crossed the A&P Event and I know this by the many obvious signs of that stage. Now I am feeling strangely reactive and negative about things that I ordinarily am able to handle with more 185

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balance and clarity, and I know that a good part of this is due to the inevitable Dark Night that follows the A&P. I realize that I am in a less than ideal position to skillfully deal with the personal issues that are driving me crazy, as I am likely to project the suffering from the illusion of duality and the odd side effects of the Dark Night onto these issues.